Grist (where I am the food editor) just got a late entry to our Scariest Food of 2010 contest: Gingerbread houses. Not because you can break a tooth on some of these hard-as-drywall sugar shacks, but because if you snacked on one bought at a Whole Foods in 23 states, you might be doubled over right now with cramps, diarrhea, and vomiting thanks to a food-borne Staphylococcus aureus infection. On...

A few weeks ago, my spare side-by-side fridge/freezer up and died. I was (and remain) pissed about this. It’s a fancy-pants Samsung, about four years old, and the Sears repair guy said the compressor would cost $800 to fix — 75% of what the fridge was new. “Samsung’s great for TVs, crap for fridges,” he said. Why do I have a spare fridge? Well, three adults and one baby live...

The farm-to-school movement has been gaining ground lately as advocates encourage administrators to bring more local food into school cafeterias. But at Olney Friends School in Barnesville, Ohio, eating locally goes beyond farm-to-school: for this small college-prep boarding school, it’s farm-AT-school all the way. And now they want to do more. Founded by local Quaker settlers in the mid-19th...

Pom not-so-wonderful at all: John Gibler’s epic, top-notch feature on Roll International – “or, as their website proclaims: ‘the largest privately held company you’ve never heard of,’ owner of Paramount Farming, the largest grower and processor of almonds and pistachios in the world; Paramount Citrus; Fiji Water; Suterra, a pesticide brand; Teleflora; PomWonderful; and the Neptune...

It”s always fun to talk with someone who has such a sense of purpose that she doesn”t feel the need to make nice. Michele Simon is one of those people. Let me be clear: Simon, a public health attorney for the Marin Institute, and author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back is a lovely individual — friendly, thoughtful, and soft-spoken....

Rx for health: Chicago-area Walgreens have begun selling “an expanded selection of food, including fresh fruits and vegetables, at 10 locations selected because they were in food deserts.” Turns out that drugstores are one of the few chain businesses operating in the low-income areas that lack access to fresh food. And since they’re already there, they don’t have much to lose by...